The Culture of Japanese Fascism (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society)

This bold collection of essays demonstrates the necessity of understanding fascism in cultural terms rather than only or even primarily in terms of political structures and events. Contributors from history, literature, film, art history, and anthropology describe a culture of fascism in Japan in the decades preceding the end of the Asia-Pacific War. In so doing, they challenge past scholarship, which has generally rejected descriptions of pre-1945 Japan as fascist. The contributors explain how a fascist ideology was diffused throughout Japanese culture via literature, popular culture, film, design, and everyday discourse. Alan Tansman’s introduction places the essays in historical context and situates them in relation to previous scholarly inquiries into the existence of fascism in Japan.Several contributors examine how fascism was understood in the 1930s by, for example, influential theorists, an antifascist literary group, and leading intellectuals responding to capitalist modernization. Others explore the idea that fascism’s solution to alienation and exploitation lay in efforts to beautify work, the workplace, and everyday life. Still others analyze the realization of and limits to fascist aesthetics in film, memorial design, architecture, animal imagery, a military museum, and a national exposition. Contributors also assess both manifestations of and resistance to fascist ideology in the work of renowned authors including the Nobel-prize-winning novelist and short-story writer Kawabata Yasunari and the mystery writers Edogawa Ranpo and Hamao Shirō. In the work of these final two, the tropes of sexual perversity and paranoia open a new perspective on fascist culture. This volume makes Japanese fascism available as a critical point of comparison for scholars of fascism worldwide. The concluding essay models such work by comparing Spanish and Japanese fascisms. __Contributors__. Noriko Aso, Michael Baskett, Kim Brandt, Nina Cornyetz, Kevin M. Doak, James Dorsey, Aaron Gerow, Harry Harootunian, Marilyn Ivy, Angus Lockyer, Jim Reichert, Jonathan Reynolds, Ellen Schattschneider, Aaron Skabelund, Akiko Takenaka, Alan Tansman, Richard Torrance, Keith Vincent, Alejandro Yarza This bold collection of essays demonstrates the necessity of understanding fascism in cultural terms rather than only or even primarily in terms of political structures and events. Contributors from history, literature, film, art history, and anthropology describe a culture of fascism in Japan in the decades preceding the end of the Asia-Pacific War. In so doing, they challenge past scholarship, which has generally rejected descriptions of pre-1945 Japan as fascist. The contributors explain how a fascist ideology was diffused throughout Japanese culture via literature, popular culture, film, design, and everyday discourse. Alan Tansman’s introduction places the essays in historical context and situates them in relation to previous scholarly inquiries into the existence of fascism in Japan. Several contributors examine how fascism was understood in the 1930s by, for example, influential theorists, an antifascist literary group, and leading intellectuals responding to capitalist modernization. Others explore the idea that fascism’s solution to alienation and exploitation lay in efforts to beautify work, the workplace, and everyday life. Still others analyze the realization of and limits to fascist aesthetics in film, memorial design, architecture, animal imagery, a military museum, and a national exposition. Contributors also assess both manifestations of and resistance to fascist ideology in the work of renowned authors including the Nobel-prize-winning novelist and short-story writer Kawabata Yasunari and the mystery writers Edogawa Ranpo and Hamao Shirō. In the work of these final two, the tropes of sexual perversity and paranoia open a new perspective on fascist culture. This volume makes Japanese fascism available as a critical point of comparison for scholars of fascism worldwide. The concluding essay models such work by comparing Spanish and Japanese fascisms. Contributors . Noriko Aso, Michael Baskett, Kim Brandt, Nina Cornyetz, Kevin M. Doak, James Dorsey, Aaron Gerow, Harry Harootunian, Marilyn Ivy, Angus Lockyer, Jim Reichert, Jonathan Reynolds, Ellen Schattschneider, Aaron Skabelund, Akiko Takenaka, Alan Tansman, Richard Torrance, Keith Vincent, Alejandro Yarza Fascism seen and unseen : fascism as a problem in cultural representation / Kevin M. Doak The people's library : the spirit of prose literature versus fascism / Richard Torrance Constitutive ambiguities : the persistence of modernism and fascism in Japan's modern history / Harry Harootunian On the beauty of labor : imagine factory girls in Japan's new order / Kim Brandt Mediating the masses : Yanagi Soetsu and fascism / Noriko Aso Fascism's furry friends : dogs, national identity, and purity of blood in 1930s Japan / Aaron Skabelund Narrating the nationality of a cinema : the case of Japanese prewar film / Aaron Gerow All beautiful fascists? : Axis film culture in imperial Japan / Michael Baskett Architecture for mass-mobilization : the Chureito memorial design competition, 1939/1945 / Akiko Takenaka Japan's imperial diet building in the debate over construction of a national identity / Jonathan M. Reynolds Expo fascism? : ideology, representation, economy / Angus Lockyer The work of sacrifice in the age of mechanical reproduction : bride dolls and the enigma of fascist aesthetics at Yasukuni Shrine / Ellen Schattschneider Fascist aesthetics and the politics of representation in Kawabata Yasunari / Nina Cornyetz Disciplining the erotic-grotesque in Edogawa Ranpo's demon of the lonely isle / Jim Reichert Hamaosociality : narrative and fascism in Hamao Shiro's the devil's disciple / Keith Vincent Literary tropes, rhetorical looping, and the nine gods of war : "fascist proclivities" made real / James Dorsey The Spanish perspective : Romancero Marroquí and the Francoist kitsch politics of time / Alejandro Yarza. Focusing on Japan, scholars of history, literature, film, art history, and anthropology demonstrate the necessity of understanding fascism s cultural manifestations.